I have release a new version of my Movie Rentals application that has the changes dswallow made in his unboxOnDemand plus some extra goodies. I've added nicer graphics all around (in my opinion). I also added a search by keyword screen and best of all I've added video previews! Now you can watch the previews for the movies right on your TiVo's Now Playing List before purchasing or renting movies! You must have a TiVo ToGo enabled receiver for this to work. So it doesn't work on Series 3 (yet). My application also plugs directly into Galleon with a configuration page. It also runs in standalone mode.

So are you saying that you figured out a way to make an HME application automatically download content to a TiVo? Or does it simply put the previews into you My TiVo Recordings folder and then the user has to download them to the TiVo using the TTCB option from Now Playing?

If it's the former I would be very interested in knowing how you accomplished this, as I have an idea for an HME app I've been considering, but this was one of the short comings I was going to run into.

So are you saying that you figured out a way to make an HME application automatically download content to a TiVo? Or does it simply put the previews into you My TiVo Recordings folder and then the user has to download them to the TiVo using the TTCB option from Now Playing?

It's the second option. One you add the free preview, you need to use the TTCM from a item called "Video Previews" in the Now Playing List". Then you can transfer the download from there. I wish there was a way to push it to the tivo. I might try and figure out how their push technology works from unbox and that other nuew one they just released to see if it's possible to simulate that using an HME app.

I've never tried it on a Mac, but it should work. If not, the start script probably just needs a little tweaking and I can help you with that. For the video previews, you'll have to either find a mac binary of ffmpeg or compile it. Here's a page I found on getting ffmpeg working on a mac. http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.ne...peg-howto.html

It's the second option. One you add the free preview, you need to use the TTCM from a item called "Video Previews" in the Now Playing List". Then you can transfer the download from there. I wish there was a way to push it to the tivo. I might try and figure out how their push technology works from unbox and that other nuew one they just released to see if it's possible to simulate that using an HME app.

I don't think you can simulate the TiVoCast feature. I'm pretty sure that it works using the same mechanisim as the online scheduling. Which means it polls TiVo's servers every 15 minutes or so, and retrieves a command which in turn tells it to download a video from a specific IP address.

Now there might be some way to point the TiVo at a proxy which spoofs those messages, but I don't know how simple that will be for the average Joe to setup.

yeah, you're probably right. I really wish they would just hire an in house HME developer to further their HME api. I'm willing to nominate Doug since he's also looking for a job! Looking at the code changes he's made to my app I can tell he's a fairly good programmer.

I wonder how feasible it would be to convert video to MJPEG format then feed the TiVo one frame at a time as an HME asset. If the network was fast enough, and you could preload a few frames as a sort of buffer, it might just be able to keep up decoding them. Although then you'd have to convert the audio to MP3 and try to come up with some way to synchronize them.

I just looked at the docs and it looks like animated GIF is the only animated format. However I think you still might be able to fake something using MJPEG and feeding it one frame at a time. Although I haven't played with HME much yet, so I'm not sure what kind of performance HME apps have.

HME is a platform designed by TiVo that allows 3rd party programs to run on the TiVo hardware. It works similar to Remote Desktop in that the TiVo is only used for display of the data, and the real work is done on a remote PC.

The SDK is written in Java, so if your user name is any indication then it should be right up your alley.

Trying to run on Galleon; Everything loads ok but doesnt queue for purchase options.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you send me your log file? I should be under logs/log.txt in the galleon directory. Also what OS are you using? If windows are you using the native version or the zipped version?

ajayabb, I think I found the problem. I was up late last night building the release. You were probably referring to it not loading the movie details page properly and then couldn't go to the page where you can purchase the video, right?

I presume since it can't log me in that's why I don't see any "purchase" or "rental" widgets. Also, the loading of text is inconsistent. Sometimes I'll get one and a half lines of a movie description. If I back out and go back in, I see the whole scrollable text paragraph.

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the problem that I found above related to purchases is that login appears to fail when it's plugged into galleon directly. I think it has to do with the httpclient libraries being old in galleon. I'm trying to figure out the fix for it as we speak.

Would you, like Doug, also be receiving a commission based on sales thru UnBox?

I do not have NetFlix or BlockBuster, does this matter for your app? Will a screen/link/folder pop up for Blockbuster & NetFlix?

Are you working on any other apps? Would also be interested in a Sirius app $! Are there other video download sites that you can make an app for?

I looked at your app months ago but didn't download because of the lack of use for the original intention of your program. I don't want to download an app that has a lot of useless folders in it.

Only the menus that work for the particular service are enabled. So there won't be a bunch of useless menus. No, you don't need to even use the NetFlix or Blockbuster stuff. You can use it just for Amazon Unbox and won't even know that it supports the other two. And yes, like Doug, I'd be receiving commission based on sales.

Is that controlled by htmlparser.jar? Because the one in your archive overwrites the one delivered by Galleon. Of course, I already had the Galleon-delivered one disabled because I had figured out it conflicted with Doug's app.

It looks like the htmlparser.jar that you and Doug are using is the same. So, is it commons-httpclient-3.1-rc1.jar instead? Doug delivers that with unboxOnDemand.

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Is that controlled by htmlparser.jar? Because the one in your archive overwrites the one delivered by Galleon. Of course, I already had the Galleon-delivered one disabled because I had figured out it conflicted with Doug's app.

It looks like the htmlparser.jar that you and Doug are using is the same. So, is it commons-httpclient-3.1-rc1.jar instead? Doug delivers that with unboxOnDemand.

yes, it has to do with the httpclient api. galleon bundles an older version which has problems. I'm trying to figure out the best way to get it to work.

I'm not trying to pit the two of you against each other but Doug's app works through Galleon with the Amazon credentials. Granted, it doesn't have the plug-in like yours does, but it does authenticate properly with Amazon.

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the problem that I found above related to purchases is that login appears to fail when it's plugged into galleon directly. I think it has to do with the httpclient libraries being old in galleon. I'm trying to figure out the fix for it as we speak.

Not that I necessarily want to spend all my waking hours working on this stuff, but maybe you and I should talk a bit about doing something with Galleon development, especially with regards to bringing things up to date and making them compatible with HD, whatever that entails.

At least at the moment, I seem to have some free time. Subject to job offers and all that.

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It took me a while to get running. I found I did not have JAVA_HOME and had to poke around to find out I needed to install the JDK since I only had JRE. I had to setup the environment variable manually but then the batch file would crap out trying to run. I had to edit the batch file to quote the invocation of the application since I installed JDK in C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_01 (the space in the directory name was causing the problem). This is what I changed:
- "%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe"

I modified my Amazon account to use the same password as my Blockbuster account thinking that I could have both BlockBuster and Unbox running. However, it seems as though only one service can be started at a time. Can you confirm? Can I run a second instance to get both?

I am also seing some other odd behavior:
Unbox
- search does not return anything, tried several different keys
- video previews are low quality/blocky. Is that due to the source or the ffmpeg conversion settings?

Blockbuster
- Selecting the movie details screen sometimes leaves the clock icon over the description.
Exiting and returning sometimes results in a clean display.
- Left arrow is unresponsive at times. Not sure if this is due to my old PC (1.6GHz, WinXP) or the app.

Finally, I have an issue that I cannot see the app from my S3. It's running via ethernet to a wireless bridge and I have not been able to see the HD photo sharing app in TiVo Desktop 2.4 either so it's some kind of connection issue. The S3 has a good network connection otherwise and can get guide data, etc. I see it in the DHCP clients list shown by the router. It just cannot see any HME apps.

Not that I necessarily want to spend all my waking hours working on this stuff, but maybe you and I should talk a bit about doing something with Galleon development, especially with regards to bringing things up to date and making them compatible with HD, whatever that entails.

At least at the moment, I seem to have some free time. Subject to job offers and all that.

Doug, that sounds good about trying to fix up Galleon a bit. I know what you mean about spending many hours on coding. I've been up late a lot lately, too.